Ultranet Down!

I would like to preface that I am not a blocker. In fact over the past 5 years of teaching I have completely immersed myself in the awe and wonderment of computers and the positive effect that ICT can have on teaching and learning in the classroom. After taking on the role as ICT co-ordinator I saw it as one of my many roles to be an early adopter and to have a go. One of my main aims was to test and see if the technology was going to facilitate teaching and learning in a collaborative environment. I consistently engaged in conversations with my colleagues to gauge their professional opinions to make sure that the appropriate technology was in place to support their classroom practice and pedagogy. In regards to the students, over time I have developed a Personal Learning Network through twitter and blogging that spans the globe. I love talking to my colleagues about this and how it has improved my efficacy as a teacher and leader. So you would think that the Ultranet would fit nicely into this description? Sadly not.

More than 1600 Victorian schools are about to get the Ultranet – an online portal and ”virtual classroom” Education Minister Bronwyn Pike championed and promised that it will transform the way students learn (The Age 16 March 2010).

I have just finished the first two days of training as an Ultranet Lead User along with 4 of my colleagues (my Principal being one of them). Here is my reflection and initial thoughts and why there is no way the Ultranet will ‘transform the way students learn’.As soon as I had seen the first Power Point presentation delivered to Ultranet Coaches and Principals by Dianne Peck (Business Owner, Ultranet), I was wondering how the Ultranet was going to work. I couldn’t believe that the main premise for its construction was around safety and that this would be provided via a closed environment. How is this possible? We had just adopted Globalstudent across the school as our main blogging tool – an online live digital portfolio and a portal into the classroom of every grade in the school. Every student from grades 3-6 has their own personal blog. This wasn’t a closed environment but open for the world to see. Why would we want to use the Ultranet? One of the main benefits of using Globalstudent is the authenticity of having a live real audience view your successes. It is possible for Gllobalstudent users to set their permissions to private and/or save their work as drafts? This can be easily done with three clicks. Ultranet users will be confronted with a confusing array of permission choices as difficult as Facebook’s (see image below). At our school we take Digital Citzenship and safety seriously. We teach students strategies for staying safe on the internet and we guide teachers and parents on how to best deal with internet safety issues. I believe it is best to teach children how to operate safely in a real life cyber environment rather than restricting their experience in the name of keeping them safe. I have often been asked the question- is this technology 5 years too late? My reply is yes. My school was part of the original Ultranet trial. Yes, it was a resounding failure. We invested a lot of time and thought trying to apply it to the primary school context. The technology was clunky and it didn’t work. The technology just wasn’t there. However, we all could see its potential and really enjoyed engaging in conversations about teachers collaborating and sharing ideas and students accessing learning tools and also sharing ideas. That’s why we spent the next 4 years looking for alternatives. In fact our Ultranet coaches encouraged us to do so. Hence, the Globalstudent blogging tools and our use of the Google education applications. The teachers and students at our school have taken to these applications like ducks to water. Teachers use the Google docs folders and applications to plan and share, and the Principal is invited to collaborate. The Principal has access and can contribute to the team/teacher folders and can view all the term planning. Students take notes whilst watching documentaries and share them in our class folder for all to view. They can upload their Powerpoint presentations to Google Docs and grab the code and embed it into their blog. Google has just released a major update for all their Document tools which includes Google Drawings where students will be able to create mind maps and/or flowcharts, to just name a few. Will this technology exist in the Ultranet? Will the Ultranet continue to have regular updates to keep up with emerging technologies? (as I am writing this into Google Docs a colleague is reading and editing). One would hope that Victorian teachers and students weren’t short changed. At this stage, I have only seen wikis, blogs, slideshows, the potential to embed video (tried, didn’t work) and the ability to upload documents which cannot be viewed inside the Ultranet. Unfortunately, the Ultranet is 5 years too late. Why should we be burdened with this? Creativity is essential for both teachers and students. Teachers need to be given the time to think creatively about their planning and how they can deliver their lessons. Students need to engage in their learning through their inventiveness. Whilst we were waiting to get onto the Ultranet, there were many discussions about how it was going to help with teaching and learning. I was trying to ascertain where the creativity would happen? What is the purpose of uploading photos (one at a time) to create a slide show? Surely having the students capture the images in context of the task, is the most important element of creating the slideshow? Especially if no one can see it. Do we need to rely on the Ultranet, the ‘network’ to be able to create something? To quote Gary Stager at ACEC 2010: “If we don’t have an effective network or access to fast broadband or a creative learning program underpinning the network then we should ‘cut the cord’. Computers are still extremely useful without the network. Maybe the “network” ie the internet is getting in the way of constructive learning.” (Thanks to Steve Collis you can see and listen to the complete Keynote at Happy Steve’s blog)

Access may be a real problem for schools that haven’t yet engaged in a 1 to 1 program. I am a strong believer in the power of 1 to 1 in the classroom. However, schools may feel that to take full advantage of the Ultranet that they need to fast track a the 1 to 1 developments and purchase substandard machines. The jury is still out on whether netbooks, for example, are the appropriate machines for creative learning environments. There has been some questions asked as to whether there will be a ‘hand held’ device interface developed for the Ultranet. With so many schools using these where will the Ultranet fit in to their profile?

My first experience of the Ultranet wasn’t a pleasant one. After being bitten once before during the first Ultranet trial, I was hoping it would be more positive. I am acutely aware that I am part of cycle one of the first release and glitches are to be expected. However, one would expect that we would at least have access for more than a few hours during the first two days of training. One hour in the morning before it went down on the second day is not good enough. For the complete array of applications to be not ready and not fully functional is not good enough. I cannot believe that for the past 4 years I have acted as an agent for change (still am) and now I find myself in a position of reaction. It is unfair that DEECD and the State Government has foisted an unfinished product upon us. Especially when many schools have worked tirelessly getting themselves Web 2.0 ready only to be given the bare bones. This is purely a political decision and a bad one.

27 Responses to “Ultranet Down!”

Hi Andrew,
Thanks for a great post, unfortunately it confirms lots of what I suspected might be the case with the Ultranet. Now that I’m no longer in a school I wondered what the final iteration of this behemoth might look like. A few weeks back I got to check out a P/Point presentation on all the different components of the Ultranet and what I saw didn’t fill me with great hope. Your post sadly confirms my thoughts.
Having just come back from Qld where the great wall of EQ keeps all things evil out and all things good safely from the view of the rest of Oz and ipso the world, one can only foresee the same happening here, very sad.
Unfortunately elections and politics often impinge on the way we are allowed to go about things and this is almost certainly the case here. Fortunately through time there have also been those sage and brave enough to see things for what they are and like all good techno types, figure out the workaround to circumvent problems. Maybe a re-boot or complete re-install of the previous operating system might work best :)?

Hi Andrew…finally someone talking sense. I was on the Ultranet Lead Users ning and was hoping to add my voice of dissent…alas none to be found!!
I have just completed my training, and the whole group expressed our dismay and utter bewilderment at the Ultranet. We kept saying ‘Why would we access the Ultranet, to access all the tools we already use?’ Someone must be pushing this, it has cost, apparently, $60 million.
I think you could safely say unless the next roll out greatly enhance this product it will not be used…certainly not by me.

Thanks for the comment John. I think that it’s time there was some honest discussion about the Ultranet. Some might say it’s too late ‘the horse has already bolted’, but I am concerned about the impact that this will have on DEECD teachers and students. The tool is about as intuitive as a ‘sledge hammer to the back of the head’. I would strongly recommend that schools not engage their students with the Ultranet until there are some marked improvements. Everyone continues to cite “release 2″ as the fix all but I can’t really see this being effective until sometime in 2011. Which begs the question, what are the alternatives and what will those alternatives look like by the time the Ultranet is fully functional?

I have just set up a Google wave for out Level 4 team meetings. Looking forward to live updates and real time collaboration. ‘Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda but didn’t use the Ultranet!’

Thanks for the comment Tim. Yes $60 Million obviously doesn’t by you much these days. Did you notice that Dianne Peck’s title is “Business Owner” which (and I am only speculating) suggests that they (DEECD) might want to on sell the concept! Can you imagine? Another issue that pertains to money is that Ultranet users should be aware that all images, documents, etc that are checked in (uploaded) to the Ultranet instantly become the property of DEECD. This policy has always existed, for example when it comes to people using Notebooks for teachers laptops anything created using them technically is the property of DEECD. I wonder what the repercussions will be for student uploaded content?

Very interested to read your post. Like you I am not a blocker, I love to try new things and I have been optimistic in the face of negative concerns about the ultranet…
I train this week, I’m still hoping my optimism is justified but I am getting more and more worried.

Good on you for saying something. The article above is just great. It’s a risk using your real name though. Just be cautious. It’s not your fault that the Ultranet is a dud, but governments come down hard on individuals when the government doesn’t have its own good products (think Al Upton, SA). If Ultranet users can’t openly chat about the problems, then teachers won’t be able to come up with innovative solutions to the problems (which is what we all do). So I say yay for more chatting. I have not done the training above as yet.

One UN problem is that the latest technologies are not lawyer approved, and anything that touches students needs to 100% protect their privacy. We’ve seen that the best technologies (like Facebook, YouTube) just don’t cut it with privacy and ownership. And there’s been reports of “middle ware employees” spying on Google Docs, but most teachers using Google Docs know enough not to identify students or reveal private data on that system. So you are right that we are 5 years behind, but some of that is a legal problem and not always a technology problem.

I am sure the Ultranet team could simply ask for all of the newest and greatest technologies to be turned on, but then there would be unknown variables and risks with privacy. To stay current, the government needs to take more risks and employ leaders/executives/business owners (that’s rich) that are brave enough to give us systems that contain some risks. Then as highly trained professionals trusted with the care of our students we can work out how to use them. I was dismayed to read in the newspapers recently that some of the UN’s Web 2.0 functionality has just been withheld from us, because someone has made a call that I could not use it appropriately in my classrooom. I would be happy to take on the risk myself and use it, but some executive has decided that I cannot be trusted, and has turned that functionality off. That really grates me. Obviously the writer of the post above could deal with all of the risks. We need to set those teachers free and let them use the newest systems in the UN. Has someone done research on us that shows we’re incompetent and unable to use the new features? What is the justification for turning them off? Maybe if we get a good level on ePotential they will let us use new technologies? If not, why do we have these measurements?

It’s like the YouTube situation. DEECD uses it, it’s still ‘banned’ in schools, but some schools use it at their own risk, and there is still no real guidance about if it’s right or wrong. No-one is brave enough to come out with black and white policy – it’s all 1000 shades of grey, depending on who you talk to on any given day. That’s not good enough – maybe we’re not being let down by the Ultranet team, but by the other people in DEECD that give us the guidance for how to use these new technologies. Someone needs to get a backbone and let us use this stuff, even while the lawyers and UN team are running around shouting out “Danger! Danger!”.

DEECD needs to open up these new systems, and then put in processes that can quickly respond to problems when they arise, because they certainly will. DEECD is losing an opportunity here to show the world they can be cutting edge. Instead they have chosen to stay safe and churn out a very boring product. Maybe they have spent all of their money up front, and don’t have any budget left to respond to problems if/when they arise? If they gave us world-view blogging and wikis, they would need to keep maintaining the system for a few years, when it’s obvious they had more than enough problems getting the product even launched in its first instance.

The Ultranet also seems crippled by what I had expected – the tools are not all ‘online’ because DEECD’s VicSmart “broadband” is criminally under-resourced to save money. The last time I heard, DEECD had a contract for a surprisingly limited amount of bandwidth to be shared between all schools – and when the first schools tried to “buy” a bigger connection, which was part of the deal first advertised with VicSmart, they were told “No, you can’t” – and the reason was simply because if every school wanted to buy 10/20/50/100MB, then DEECD would not be able to have any bandwidth left over for other schools. If the Ultranet had rich media and digital portfolios online, then VicSmart would crash, or DEECD would have to buy more bandwidth to share between more schools.

….
Yes, all education related work done by a teacher full time employed by DEECD is owned by the government, but this is not usually clear so teachers are asked to sign a supplementary release. Teachers will always own the “moral” copyright of work they have done, meaning they can mention it in their CV’s. Technically DEECD “owns” the whole article above, and the writer is publishing “official” communication from DEECD because they are an employee, and the context of the article is directly related to their employment and their paid role in their school implementing the UN. This is a big problem with Web 2.0, because Web 2.0 is all about opinions. Maybe DEECD just doesn’t know how to deal with that just yet. That is the real reason we are 5 years behind I think.

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Students will always own their own work and their parents will need to sign releases to let it be shared with other students/teachers/schools. Cue UN problems.

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Yes, they want to sell the UN. This is why they didn’t go with existing systems that have been used to great effect in the rest of the world, like the Victorian developed StudyWiz (it was originally developed here, for heaven’s sake, and the UN was developed in NT!!!! That doesn’t make any sense to me at all.). We could have had that off-the-shelf years ago, and it wouldn’t have cost $60M (I thought it had gone up to $89M???). I am so disappointed that we don’t have even half of the functionality that Studywiz has give the UK/US. Now that we have the UN, someone needs to put it side by side with Studywiz and other systems, to see what taxpayers really did get with their money. That would be a very interesting activity. I’d like to open up a newspaper and see a matrix of features listed for UN and the other systems. And see where the big green ticks are.

Hi Andrew and thanks you for your courageous and honest appraisal of the Ultranet. I have also been an ‘early adopter’ and an ‘ultranet lead user’, and feel somewhat uncomfortable trying to encourage and enthuse my fellow staff members into using a platform that is not as good as what is already available on the www. My analogy is ‘putting eagles in cages’ while trying to incubate fully-grown chooks. I think many web2.0 ready schools will be running the ultranet side-by-side with what they already do – globalstudent, wikis and google. As always, I will do my best with what we have available and count myself lucky that our students have many options in education and bright futures.

I couldn’t agree more with your comments. Very well articulated. I too am not a blocker, in fact I am heavily involved in ICT for DEECD (hence my anonymity).

I have waited for a global community with integrated tracking systems for dynamic and accurate grading, something to improve my teacher judgement and timeliness as a teacher. I have waited for what their marketing juggernaut said they would deliver, and they have failed.

While asking teachers to reduce ‘busy time’, they have increased it.

While asking teachers to promote global citizenship, they have ‘locked it down’ to a state-wide system (without student learning contacts).

While promoting technology that (supposedly) ‘you already know’, they spend millions on training.

While paying millions promoting best practice, they have also payed millions to create a Nemesis of quality ICT use.

I don’t know that they will ever kill it off, but they should. I’m over it, and it’s less than 6 months in.

Thanks for this review which I found today after the first two hours of our Ultranet training.

I have spent the last two weeks trying to familiarise myself with the site and the available features. I smarted at the 7 times I lost some work I was trying to put up when I was logged out in the background after 15 mins. I nearly died of exhaustion after trying to upload some images one by one. I snorted in derision when I tried to locate a colleague via her name, only to have to resort to edumail to find her email, back to Ultranet, type in email and there she was where she hadn’t been before!

Like you, I have made successes in the past of using other easily available (and ultimately more easy to use) web solutions to interaction.

I want my staff to spend time on improving the basics while the school remains below the state mean. I’m worried that they will be forced into spending hours trying to make this site work in the classroom and finding artificial ways of using it while wasting time trying to teach the children to use its obtuse configuration tools and totally non-intuitive interface! Oh well…..

Hi Andrew…again! I have found the recent comments to be fascinating reading. Finally some refreshing views are bubbling to light.
I shared your blog with our Lead Users a month or so ago and have now shared the latest comments. The common factor upon reading was a huge sigh of relief…these comments have articulated our frustration and annoyance perfectly.

Our planning for Monday has been about articulating C21st skill/learning…critical analysis being one…and using these as a mirror to reflect on web 2.0 tools, software and hardware used in our curriculum. We are using ‘betchablog’ and the post on IWB’s/and using PowerPoint to help with this.

I have no doubt that as Lead Users who have been asked to prepare the whole day for their staff, we will face difficult questions around the authenticity of the Ultranet. We trust our staff to make professional judgements and believe they will come to the same conclusion as we did.

Our day will be spent taking advantage of broadening pedagogical knowledge and increasng ICT skills in a host of software and Web 2.0 applications, that we can use to promote C21st skills within our curriculum.

All I can think of is how this money could/should have been used.

I note the comments about being wary of using your name…if they came to fruition it would simply paint the Ultranet in its true that worth(lessness).

I’ve been in a position of lead user and involved in many ICT initiatives over the years.
Ultranet may have it’s technical issues but they can be resolved (it doesn’t reflect well on the trial users or the development process that what we see now is the result.) the ultranet will fail simply because teachers don’t have enough ongoing “play” time. You can only learn ICT initiatives if you are given time to play and you must want to play. I want to, but I just don’t have the time – too many other “jobs”.
This is going to take years of build up because of this lack of time. .. and by the time we get there, it will be old technology.

Good comments from Tim Rogers. I only warn of using your own name for comments because I have been one of the central government people whose job it was to deal with personal comments (they do exist). But now there’s more than one person commenting, it’s harder to deal with. Yay for teachers!

The Ultranet has just been nominated for an internal government award. Soon it will be the “award winning” Ultranet.

After watching RM try to get into WA and Kidmap trying to get into NSW, it is clear that a digitised process is only effective when it replicates an existing, and effective everyday process. Everyone does’t plan, teach, assess and report the same way now, so forcing everyone to do it the same way is a major change for a teacher’s professional duties, let alone bring in the need to do everything on a computer for teachers and students. And looking at effective pedagogy as step 1 then looking at a computer data input screen for step 2 is not exactly a logical process.

I am not saying the Ultranet will fail. Of course it can succeed and even act as the catalyst for the wider change that is needed. As adults learning how to use it, it’s important that people get to express their feelings about new learning, which is what this blog is about. It’s obviously here to stay (or maybe just until the next government calls it a dud and gives into what will no doubt become future union pressure), so it’s important to get on record with what’s needed as changes and upgrades for “phase 3″ and so on.

Great post Andrew and finally it’s good to see some teachers expressing true opinions about the relative uselessness of the Ultranet.
The only positive I can think of is that it forces teachers who are lagging in ICT skills to get involved but it does so in such an unintuitive way (look at the complicated process involved in merely uploading a photo) that there is the fear that it will merely make them more opposed to the use of technology.

Interesting that the very first thing this blogger says is “I would like to preface that I am not a blocker” and then goes on a blocking rant …. reminds me of when teacher laptops were first introduced 12 or so years ago over in Vic (where I used to live) … a considerable number of teachers (and principals) just handed them over to their uni-student sons and daughters. Of course those teachers weren’t blockers either, they just didn’t have the time to get involved with new ideas and technologies. Now, apparently you can’t walk down any corridor in any school in Victoria without seeing the teacher laptops being used for teaching and learning in almost every classroom. Their use has become ‘normalised’. At the moment in our schools we have Moodles, SharePoints, Intranets and other commercial solutions for the problems of collaboration and curriculum delivery … none of them really satisfactory … and all with ad hoc training at best … so teachers who move to a new school have to start all over again learning the ‘in-house’ system … and not one of them will encourage teaching staff to share their units of work (let alone their teaching strategies) with others beyond their faculty, learning area or year level. It looks like your Ultranet will have unified training and solid support, and of course in any system that is designed to change and grow with the needs of teachers and students … it will inevitably have bugs … and even the ‘Gods of Web 2.0′, google, facebook twitter and hotmail have all had their embarrassing outages … that’s what happens when you want to do something that is totally necessary, big and bold. At the moment all over Australia there are a hundreds of different units on ‘Gold’ (we’ve got some great ones here in WA!!), ‘Antarctica’ and ‘Atomic Structure’ etc being taught. They range from the brilliant to the abysmal in their design and delivery. Your Ultranet is not going to help an abysmal teacher with their delivery, but at least the kids in any class will have access to brilliantly designed, constantly up-to-date and personalised units of work thanks to teachers sharing via Ultranet…. I envy you … and no, I don’t think it will take you 12 years to ‘normalise’ Ultranet, but it will take time. Over here we also have an online environment, but it idle, because there was no money spent on training and ‘teaching the teachers’ … we will get it eventually … in fact, all our work, planning, design and delivery is going up ‘into the cloud’ and yes, there are many, many teachers who just don’t realise this truism … and as Michael Fullan says … ‘the more access our students have to learning technologies, the more we need great teachers’… yep, I envy you ‘eastern staters’ …. we are a long way from personalising learning over here, butyou are doing the inevitable, and something that has never been done before on such a scale … good luck from Brendan!

I understand your frustrations with the Ultranet and the current difficulties that you are facing with technical issues and also with only having the first stage of it currently available. I, however, remain optimistic that the Ultranet can be a catalyst (or one of them) for transformation in our schools and schooling system, a transformation that leads away from teachers as gatekeepers of student learning towards schools where students undertake authentic project based learning.

A couple of thoughts, I don’t think that the Ultranet is designed to replace what you’re already doing with the websites you mention. For example, I believe despite the Ultranet duplicating much of the functionality of the global teacher and global students sites, these will continue to be funded and operated by DEECD. The Ultranet community is supposedly 1.5 million users so while it is a walled garden it is certainly a large one, much bigger than most of the online communities I use. Also a number of commenters above have suggested that being public isn’t always a good idea, I’d tend to agree, suggesting there are occasions where students would be best to use public/open websites while other times a closed/safe/private site like the Ultranet is desirable. I’m sure you only post a tiny fraction of the content you produce online. It will be interesting to see how schools approach this, I’m certainly hoping that the Ultranet leads to more openness, in a closed way! As you say, privacy settings are available on blogs/facebook but I’d hope the Ultranet would offer better alternatives.

Lastly, I think Gary Stager is dead wrong about cutting the cord, and hope he was just being dramatic. There is no reason why any school can’t address issues to do with access. Also more creativity has come from You Tube (and a thousand other websites) than ever came from logo (Don’t get me wrong I love Scratch et al) The Internet, has transformed how you, I and our students learn outside of school. While the Ultranet might not currently (or ever) be the silver bullet, I hope that it be one of agents that challenge the notion of the instructional teacher as the gatekeeper of knowledge and help move our schools towards more passion based student projects.

I’d encourage anyone whose job it is to promote ICT and the Ultranet to focus on the main game, that is, encouraging schools to reflect on the opportunities that ubiquitous access to technology provides. That is what I will be doing.

It’s not a “blocking rant”, Observer/Brendan. It’s a reflective journal entry (with 13 question marks, just to prove that his mind isn’t made up). Reflective journals are one of the best examples of a professional development activity, which in this case has spawned 100% useful professional dialogue, which doesn’t exist anywhere else (the fact that it doesn’t appear anywhere else is a very interesting point in itself).

When you are making students learn something it’s OK to sometimes say “Just shut up and do it,” but when highly trained professional adult teachers are expected to learn something, it’s important they get to express their feelings and ideas, based on their own professional experiences and expectations, if they want to. I am sure the original poster, based on his early adoption and analysis, has gone deeper into Ultranet than most teachers, and has probably already found great ways to do things, and has probably taught a lot of others.

Myself and every other teacher I spoke to over the previous week knew the server was going to crash. There is no way it was going to handle that much traffic. Hope it can handle all the teachers AND students as time goes on.

Thanks for your frank assessment of the Ultranet Andrew. It’s a worry that many teachers will opt to place their only blogs and wikis in the gated community of the Ultranet instead of the open Internet. I think the Ultranet has a lot going for it, but I agree with you that the most exciting educational potential lies outside. It would be a serious mistake to neglect great local initiatives like globalteacher and globalstudent because of the Ultranet. Cyber safety matters, and more restricted environments have a part to play, but we must also teach students to be safe on the open Internet – a place where they will spend much of their lives.

It is now late October and the Ultranet is still cutting out as precious time is spent trying to satisfy the teacher user license requirements.
Hours of time spent for very little return.
Something to consider with an election just around the corner.
Now is the time for a community debate about a costly top heavy system that is draining tax payer dollars from the education budget.